Why Big Tech wants you to shift the definition of 'good enough'

When is technology “good enough”?

If you’re running a mission-critical datacentre, for example, you start with “five nines” as the definition of “good enough” – 99.999% availability, roughly equivalent to five minutes downtime a year.

Does that seem a bit over the top? Maybe 99.5% seems good to you – if so, that equates to about 44 hours of downtime per year, or nearly two days. Maybe not so good, then? Certainly not if you were a passenger caught up in the recent chaos caused by an outage at NATS, the UK’s national air traffic control organisation.

But the difference between good – 99.5%, perhaps – and good enough at 99.999% is enormous. Some estimates suggest that every nine you add as a decimal point after 99% adds an extra zero to the end of the figure for total cost of ownership. Is good enough really worth it?

This is becoming an increasingly important question for the future of technology, because the Big Tech companies driving the digital revolution want to redefine “good enough”.

Take driverless cars, for example. It is remarkable what autonomous vehicles are capable of doing – an incredible achievement, brought about through billions of dollars of investment. But would you trust one to take your children to school every day?

For the sake of argument, let’s say that autonomous vehicle technology is 99.5% good – and that you would trust one with your kids when it hits five nines. That’s not an unreasonable expectation of what would be considered good enough.

But to reach “good enough” will most likely take as much investment again as has already been made – perhaps even more.

It’s the same with generative AI (GenAI). The first time you use a service such as ChatGPT or even Google’s AI Overviews, it blows your mind. AI researchers and developers have done something incredible. But we all know GenAI gets it wrong plenty of times. Are you ready to bet your business on the output of a GenAI service? It’s good, but not good enough.

And here again, the additional investment needed to make GenAI “good enough” is likely to outstrip the many billions already being ploughed into development. It’s why the Big Tech executives are trying to convince you they are on the verge of some earth-shattering breakthrough – call it artificial general intelligence (AGI), call it superintelligence, whatever fits your marketing strategy – because they need you to believe that “good enough” is imminent, to justify all that extra investment.

But those investors want their returns. That means driverless cars becoming mainstream; it means our lives and our businesses being run by GenAI.

It means everyone – as consumers, as employees, as business leaders – believing that these technologies are good enough.

People in politics and policymaking talk about the Overton Window – a concept that defines the range of policies or ideas considered to be acceptable for mainstream discourse.

Over a period of years- sometimes even decades – those politicians considered “extremist” try to expand or move the Overton Window so that previously unthinkable ideas become part of everyday debate. You can point to any number of examples in today’s geopolitics of issues that would once have been considered extreme that drive political discussion now.

In technology, we’re entering a time of huge potential and excitement that promises enormous cultural, social and economic benefits for all – if it’s done ethically.

But it’s also a time when tech influencers will be looking to shift the digital Overton Window – the Altman Window? Zuckerberg Window? Musk Window? – to allow technologies that we would once have not considered good enough, to be sold and used as “good enough”.

And that should not be good enough for anybody.